[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KBBYvj4YQLE (full video is an hour and a half, but you can skip to any bit because he just makes the same handful of points over and over again)
I'm somewhat dubious of a Youtube channel called "Western Liberty" that was created the day of Cummings's testimony, which contains nothing but the session and short clips of it. Using the link above avoids any potential ad revenue going to that clearly political pointed channel.
For anyone that's interested, here are the links to the other sessions of this committee:
- 22nd April 2026: https://parliamentlive.tv/event/index/e79ae489-4db6-4159-88b...
- 3rd June 2026: https://parliamentlive.tv/event/index/f27d8b93-b09d-433a-8e6...
- 10th June 2026: https://parliamentlive.tv/event/index/097aadbd-b58d-4f76-90e...
- 15th July 2026: https://parliamentlive.tv/event/index/87f1e00f-82b5-432b-af6...
- 2nd September 2026: https://parliamentlive.tv/event/index/110f81a5-32c4-4577-bab...
- 16th September 2026: https://parliamentlive.tv/event/index/ecf7a237-54c9-40be-922...
Anyway, after watching the session with Cummings, I have to say I'm deeply unimpressed with his contribution. While I found his bluntness somewhat refreshing, he was clearly irritated at being (repeatedly) asked to suggest actual solutions instead of just using the session as a pulpit for his grievances.
The state isn’t totally incompetent but doing it properly would be a serious undertaking, the kind of thing where the recent track record of big government tech projects isn’t great
If you want to really make sure nobody in the uk can easily access 4chan (PRC style) it needs some effort, and you're in an arms race with attempts to mask/tunnel traffic so it gets through
This is how it works, if you want I can explain to you why it works like this, or you can work it out from first principles. But this is not a proposal.
VPNs are an asterisk and they work not by avoiding this natural unavoidable principle, but by tunneling, the VPN or proxy vendor is putting themselves on the headers, and on the backend they still route the packets to the destination by putting the intended destination on the headers.
If these VPNs don't comply with local regulations and are used to evade national restrictions they can and are often themselves subject to bans. But even if not, it acts as a sort of waiver and compromising element for all illicit activity.
Sometimes it's not necessary to completely outlaw something, it is sufficient to make it so that engaging in the outlawed activity is sufficiently uncomfortable and clear that it is illegal, forcing users to undeniably acknowledge they are avoiding the law. An example of this is trying to watch pirated movies without paying for them, yeah you can do it, but you gotta do some shady shit and dodge a lot of malware, and eat shady gambling ads and etcetera.
In addition to making you feel like an asshole, it removes any recourse you may have, it's very hard to make any claim later, you cannot really complain later if you were accessing it illegally to begin with. Nobody is going to pursue you to the end of the world not to access a pirated movie or an illegal website, but they pursue the distributor and make things very uncomfortable enough so that you are effectively hiding like a fiending outlaw.
I don’t think it’s weird to point out the little guys (especially former or current EU) getting strapped.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_weapons_of_the_United_...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/France_and_weapons_of_mass_des...
Now we’re both wrong!
The French are now using submarines (striking distance and speed, blah blah)
and are apparently being looked at as the leader of “forward deterrence” in the region.
https://tvpworld.com/93637117/frances-nuclear-umbrella-which...
And politicians have repeatedly stated the need for better control of information, connecting it directly to the Ukraine conflict and perceived threats from Russia.
I think there’s a strong case to be made that the push for information control is partly connected to military/defense goals.
1) Notice that the odds that a foreign power is going to be able to harm them in any meaningful way for violating their "child 'safety'" laws that curtail freedom of speech and association are very low
2) Notice that 4chan is fighting harder to resist these attacks on free speech and association than many of big names in the sector and reflect on what it might mean when _4chan_ is the hero of the story
Alas.
Isn't the issue that the "big names" in the sector are not exclusively US based? The big American tech companies have employees, assets, or at least a business presence of some sort in countries outside the US, which means that they are exposed to legal systems in those other countries.
That is an issue, but it's explicitly not what I was talking about. To pick one example, Discord is -AFAIK- US-based. They decided to knuckle under rather than tell the UK, Australia, and others to fuck right off with their free-speech-and-association-limiting horseshit.
Multinationals have their own problems, but they're -when we measure by number of businesses- a tiny minority of businesses. My commentary was exclusively about US-based companies.
And even if a US-based company happens to have employees in a country that's pushing this shit, well, they can shrimply close that office and explain to local politicians exactly why. It's regrettable to lose good employees, but it's way worse to be far less of a hero in the fight for fundamental rights than 4chan and Kiwi Farms are just to keep a few good employees.
They have a registered office in Schiphol:
https://discord.com/company-information
Discord could keep all of its employees, infrastructure, and business within the United States, but like other big names it has not. It would rather pursue more business opportunities.
4chan is only reasonably immune from this because it's not really operating as a business...
You'll note the "First they came for" poem has a beginning and doesn't extend to all subcultures. It doesn't say "First they came for the KKK." And, of course, it doesn't say "First they came for the Nazis."
Just as saints and captains of industry deserve no less scrutiny and liability under the law than the rest of us, scoundrels and horrible people deserve no less protection under the law than the rest of us.
If your disgust for an entity prevents you from being able to recognize when they're doing something that's an unalloyed good, then you still have quite a bit of emotional maturity to develop.
To put the previous paragraph another way: It's entirely consistent to decry an someone as a loathsome scumbag that all upstanding people should shun and refuse to associate with while also remarking that that one time they dove into a freezing river to save a child being swept away was a good and noble thing to do, and behavior that we should all aspire to mirror.
And they got it. "I'd give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake." But that doesn't mean anyone needs feel sympathy for the devil. We're not obligated to cheer when the wretched hive of scum and villainy keeps its liquor license another year. The law was followed and we can move on.
> If your disgust for an entity prevents you from being able to recognize when they're doing something that's an unalloyed good
... It is usually the case when we're talking about 4chan (and always when talking about Kiwi Farms) that "unalloyed" is doing a lot of the kind of load-bearing one probably wants an alloy for. 4chan's most positive benefit to society is as a litmus test for precisely how far the [xkcd-1357](https://xkcd.com/1357/) principle goes. They are 100% welcome, per their freedom of the press (and the freedom of speech of their users), to host their website. On their infrastructure. With their own DOS protection. In a country that recognizes those rights and protects them. That's the system working as intended.
But don’t worry! We will check your passport when you open your phone (already live in the UK, efforts supported by the GBP 2M secret donation of Meta to NGOs).
And what’s the worst thing that could happen? No one would for sure arrest you for being critical of a foreign government.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/palestine-action...
Though I guess we've already seen something similar in France with Telegram...
Though I guess we've already seen something similar in 2024 with France and Telegram...
Bunch of jihadists.
What Ofcom wants next is to make VPNs illegal.
https://www.blocked.org.uk/site/http://www.4chan.org suggests the latter to me, but the checks aren't very recent
Beyond that, it is just madness to try to control the US company or fine it. Going beyond this duty shows that not all biscuits are present at the afternoon tea.
It's not like Facebook, or anyone's personal life or business, depends on 4chan.
Good grief. This is sad stuff.
Ofcom knows its rulings don't apply internationally.
So yes, the status quo is enforced by the US courts, as if it was ever in doubt and nothing at all has changed.
I may be reading too much into the editorialized writeups about Ofcom but even their statements imply they thought they were just going to impose their laws globally and that other countries would line up to help them do it?
This quote from the court is amazing:
> American courts generally decline to enforce foreign judgments that violate the United States Constitution
Indeed. Who could have predicted this?
Which raises the scarier question of why they tried this at all? Was the defeat a planned showing to justify future action to justify more control of the internet, as Preston Byrne speculates? Are they using this as a demonstration of why internet censorship is the only solution? It’s hard to imagine why they thought they were going to get anywhere with this case, unless failing was the goal
1. 4chan actually lost its case in the US District Court on 15 September 2026. (sauce: https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/us-court-dismisses-...
The judge dismissed its lawsuit against Ofcom for lack of jurisdiction, because Ofcom was protected by foreign sovereign immunity.
2. The judge's comments were obiter dicta observations that were not necessary to decide the case, rather than a binding ruling that Ofcom's actions were unconstitutional, making the headline somewhat selective, it's hardly the defeat of a giant regulatory system. Still, I suppose he needs to show he did something to earn his fees.
We could go on and on and fucking on about American double standards here:
Cuba. ABC being hassled over Jimmy Kimmel making gags about Kirk. The White House restricting reporting. Ending support for public broadcasting. Book bans, the CLOUD act, the TIKTOK DIVESTITURE fercrissakes. Sanctions on the ICC.
They have tariffs on foreign double standards because it's a key export business.
While the US isn't perfect it is also far from the worst conceivable entity to be in that position (and current UK and Australian governments provide easy examples). If they want to use their influence to promote free speech then good, because we need it. Just less of the mass surveillance of absolutely everyone at the same time, then we'd be good.
Quote from the article:
> Ofcom has targeted 200-ish American platforms with censorship orders; only four of those sites, all of which are my clients, refused
Seems like Ofcom broadly got the result they wanted. A 98% success rate is not going to be particularly discouraging to them.
4chan was absolutely the defining target of this wave of noise, but X is what really bothers the UK establishment.
Not being able to do business in (or, depending on how serious they are about enforcement action, visit) the UK is actually pretty constraining. It's understandable if other companies decided they would prefer to find a middle ground that lets them provide one face to the US and another to the UK, or even that they're not interested in 4chan-style maximalism and found it non-onerous to comply with the UK asks because they're pretty in-line with the site's existing standards (I'd have to see the list of sites that complied to have a real opinion on that part).
The thing is, you can afford sticking the finger to the UK if you do not have any business interests there. A platform like 4chan won't be bothered even if the UK government says "all payments to be made towards 4chan for advertising are hereby seized until the fine is paid off". But places like Twitter or Meta, that derive millions if not billions of euros a year from the UK and European advertisers? Now that's a lot of money to lose, money that even American shareholders will complain about it being missing from the revenue sheet.
In my comment I explained how countries, including the US, project their laws by imposing controls within their jurisdiction.
The weird part about this case is how they thought they could directly project their laws into another country in a way that overrides that country’s constitution, and they expected the other country to override their own constitution in agreement.
That’s not the same. This was something weirder, which is why there is speculation that it was designed to fail as a demonstration.
The US fundamentally disagrees with other countries on the limits of their own jurisdiction to include basically anything tangentially related to the US.
Again, I am far from anti-US but any outsider can see this for what it is: a one way street.
Let's see the Dutch get a US based server that is violating Dutch laws. It will never happen.
If European countries banded together to direct their banks to offer services to the sanctioned ICC judges, for example, I think the US would back down on that - yes even under Trump, although there would be some bluster first.
// If European countries banded together to direct their banks to offer services to the sanctioned ICC judges, for example, I think the US would back down on that - yes even under Trump, although there would be some bluster first.
That's a very good way to force the Hague Invasion Act to manifest in some form or another.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Service-Members%27_Pr...
Trump personally intervened when two US spooks were driving on the wrong side of the road in London, with the driver most likely on her phone, killed someone, and then fled the country.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Harry_Dunn
Compare this with a hispanic american who severely injured someone in similar circumstances. Extradition granted and was convicted for a 32 month prison sentence in the UK.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c5y89k07we3o
The servers were seized under a mutual legal enforcement agreement and it remains to be seen if it underwent a separate Dutch legal review. Quite of a bit of legal footwork gets skipped when the “terrorism” charge is invoked. But it looks like the servers are not being physically turned over, the disks are being imaged and that is what is being transferred.
4chan is suing Ofcom, not the other way round.
It's not just that courts generally decline. It's now also against US law for them to enforce the judgment without assessing the Constitutional issues. And the burden of proof is on those trying to enforce the judgment.
https://www.texasmonthly.com/being-texan/how-leaders-texas-r...
When we remember history, what we remember tends to be white-washed.
(You could say the Taliban were even more thoroughly 'defeated' in Afghanistan while the country was occupied by the US, but it can hardly be said that it was a victory for the US either, given what happened as soon as they left).
Countries used to enforce this at their borders (for foreign information) because it largely worked. They couldn’t stop 100% of the copies of the book, but they could stop there being enough copies for it to be part of the cultural zeitgeist (most of the time).
Not anymore. The companies don’t have a local HQ to harass, and the information doesn’t flow through infrastructure the government owns. They’ve pretty much entirely lost the ability to control the flow of information, and they’ve largely lost the ability to control its direction either with the fall of major news outlets.
I don’t think they have the support for a China-style great firewall, but I’m not British so maybe I’m wrong.
I think it’s a good thing information is set free, but I see why they tried it. It’s the only politically tenable way they had to try to keep that control.
Didn't the USA kidnap a president from another country from that country, just the other day?
What ties are there to the current conversation?
By deliberately going after unwinnable cases, there is perhaps here a deliberate attempt to project a "voice of common sense" - effectively demonstrating that this is uneforceable nonsense, regardless of what the then-current government and media insisted. So they make a big show of it being defeated in the hope that the powers that be seen sense and quietly drop it.
Or they really are delusional. I dunno.
Why is this surprising? The United States does this all the time, successfully.
Indian citizens living in India, who have never left India and only do business with Indian entities, have to declare compliance with US laws (FATCA) when opening a bank account in India with an Indian bank. This is enforced by the Indian government.
That's just one handshake away from their bank which does have business with US and their dollaridos.
The surprise is that Britain is a local backwater and the United States isn't. You can't throw your weight around if you don't have any weight.
When something can be explained by both incompetence and conspiracy, the correct explanation is usually incompetence.